Welcome to Part II of the Quick Secure Setup Series. Be sure to check out Quick, Secure Setup Part I first, although this can be taken on its own if you’d just like to configure UFW with Fail2ban correctly. At the end of Part I we quickly setup a basic iptables config just to get the firewall up and doing its job. The problem with iptables, isn’t actually a problem with iptables itself, but rather […]

Ever play or even hear of Indie games? Many have not but a little piece of humble pie and some marketing genius has brought them into the limelight. Indie games aren’t a type of game but rather a classification of any game that is developed and distributed without a large video game publisher behind it. At first glance you think, Big deal, if someone has a good enough game it will sell regardless. Alas, it […]

Welcome to the first part of my Quick Secure Setup series. This series serves to accomplish a primary goal. To help one quickly and efficiently configure their ubuntu server in such a way that it is very secure, WHILE still providing great usability and maintainability. A lot of people have great intentions to secure their server, SELinux, detailed ip-tables configurations, log audits, etcetera. I’ve found that after a short while because of the maintenance involved […]

During my transition from Windows to Ubuntu linux there were very few applications that I couldn’t find a suitable Linux alternative for based on what I was accustomed to on the Windows side. In fact I did a quick scan of the application landscape before my transition and made sure that for any road blocks I could come up with some solution. For example I knew Microsoft Outlook would be a problem. Outlook was and […]

I’ve been using APC battery backup products for decades now. Anytime I had ever looked at another brand they always fell short in two primary areas for me, reliability and features. I can’t remember the last time I did some research on home office or personal UPS devices but it’s clear APC doesn’t own this market anymore. Tripp Lite and what I’ll call the newcomer, CyberPower seem to be hitting the sweet spot better […]

UPDATE (May 2016) :: Well almost exactly 5 years after I wrote this article, detailing why the current reward system was bad and outlining changes to make it more successful, they finally listened. You now get 2 stars for every dollar spent instead of 1 star per visit. There has been a bit of negative press about it but really its just the people who go there for their one cup of drip coffee a […]

How did it come to this. The messaging revolution. The patented keyboard. The innovative user interface. The security surrounding the entire solution. I remember when the BlackBerry was the best messaging device around and when being the best messaging device in a smartphone world was good enough to do well in. What happened? Why is RIM losing now? The same reason many other companies fail, they stayed too stagnant for too long. Granted they released […]